An external view of the Met Office building at night.

Dr Gordon Inverarity

Areas of expertise

  • Variational data assimilation
  • Kalman filters
  • Rose/cylc suite development

Publications by Gordon Inverarity

Current activities

The Global Ocean Forecasting team is responsible for bringing science and technology updates developed by scientists and software engineers working at the Met Office and partner organisations into our operational forecast systems. In particular, we

  • prepare changes to our operational workflows;
  • trial and assess proposed changes;
  • monitor and prepare updates to our operational workflows.

Gordon's personal contribution focuses on improving suite design and efficiency, while overseeing quality assurance of the implementation of the science developed by the Met Office and partner organisations.

Career background

Following a degree in applied mathematics and a doctorate in magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) turbulence in solar and laboratory plasmas, Gordon stayed at the University of St Andrews for another eighteen months studying MHD reconnection as a postdoctoral researcher in the solar theory group . On joining the Met Office in 1996, his initial work in the Meteorological Research Flight (now part of Observation Based Research) focused on processing data from the research aircraft's inertial and satellite navigation systems, wind measuring system and temperature probes. His next post in the Orographic Processes group involved studying the theory of inertia-gravity waves. Gordon moved to Data Assimilation and Ensembles in 2003, becoming a manager in 2014 and taking over as project manager for the development of the upgrade to the MOGREPS-G ensemble to become an ensemble of data assimilations using four-dimensional ensemble variational data assimilation (En-4DEnVar) that subsequently became operational in December 2019.  Gordon moved to his present role as manager of the Global Ocean Forecasting team in 2019.

External recognition

Gordon is a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society and received its Quarterly Journal editors' review award in 2006.